Drupal Solution

Effectiveness of Digital Marketing

Harikrishnan.v | | 4 min read

Effectiveness of digital marketing has always been a controversial subject. For some businesses​, it is a winning proposition while for others, it is a loss making machine. The reason for this may be the perspective with which one approaches digital marketing. It is like a weapon which can be used to conquer your enemy's territory. If you use it well, then you will win. If not, it can back fire, that too dramatically.

​From a review of existing literature, it appears that it is influenced by the type of product and therefore the customer base and the specific marketing objective that is sought for. For example, in the case of a car, it is more about creating a brand value whereas for a product like sunglasses, it might be about lead generation and actual sales. In some businesses, it is also used for engaging with customers. In this article, we will look at how it has been used by three large corporations for enhancing brand value and deepening customer relations. The corporations reviewed are Citi Bank, Volkswagen and 20th Century Fox.

​Citi Bank​

Cit​i Bank is one of the world's largest banks and has a good presence in India. Citi Bank launched a digital marketing campaign, named Unscramble 48, to promote their personal loan scheme. The campaign involved an offline and online component with both being dovetailed neatly. They conducted a series of events in a shopping mall that directly or indirectly connects people to a product of Citi Bank. The strategic decision here was to get many well known bloggers and social media evangelists as the participants in these events. Citi Bank encouraged participants to record their performance and promote it online. The video with maximum outreach and virality was to be ranked 1st and the producer was eligible to win an iPhone5. They were required to promote their videos for 1 month through their blogs and friends circle. The result of the online campaign was astonishing, Around 485,500 views were generated on YouTube and it had created a big buzz on Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media. Citi bank's new product had reached a large audience.

​Volkswagen India​

It is with a clear view that Volkswagen, the automotive giant used this platform. Volkswagen India was looking to increase their exposure among​the professional classes. But rather than simply running a conventional ad campaign, they wanted a viral component on it. Based on the nature of audience, they chose LinkedIn as the preferred medium. Volkswagen India launched a Company Page and opened it up to the public. They started updates on their car models, its comforts, specifications and comparisons. They soon found rapid increase in customer engagement. Going further, they created a series of recommendation ads, which showcased some of the brand’s recommendations from their page to other LinkedIn users that fit their targeted demographic. That clicked. Volkswagen was able to receive 3,000 car recommendations in a month and nearly one million updates about Volkswagen models through a single network Linkedin. Clearly it had gone viral. Volkswagen knows very well that a car is not an instant buy product. Any potential customer does a lot of homework prior to buying a car. Here, the viral campaign created a positive buzz around the brand and also got them visibility amongst a large audience. Net result being deeper customer engagement and goodwill. A key factor for succeeding in such a strategy is that a dedicated team must be built for managing the campaign. There must be a team that is alert to the comments that turn up around the campaign and moderate effectively. They also need to maintain a continuous stream of informative and creative posts around the queries that customers post.

​20th Century Fox

The next story is on digital marketing in media industry drawing on the experience of 20th Century Fox. Leading up to the release of the film Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps, 20th Century Fox, acquired a large fan base for the move through a Facebook Page dedicated to the movie. This effort was premised on two reasons. The number of fans on a page indicate credibility for a page and it also is a means to reaching out to more and more people creating visibility for the movie. If they create 1,000 fans, as per Facebook, the reach of a single post will be near to 48,000 people. From the commencement of shooting, they interacted with the audiences by providing content and updates about the film.They used Premium Like Ads and Premium Video Ads also. The outcome of the campaign as reported by 20th Century Fox is that 26% of people who saw the movie remembered that they saw on the Facebook ads earlier. More than 260,000 people liked their Facebook page and a tracking study found that more than 1.1 million people had intended on seeing the movie after seeing one of the Facebook ads.

These 3 companies have used different platforms to promote their content. And they belong to different business segments also. These all points that Digital Marketing, undoubtedly is an effective marketing platform with out any specific boundary. A clear strategy and a strong​marketing and ​technical team can do magic with your brand.

 

References :

 

 

 

Related Topics